The Tuesday Roundup
Today I’m sharing resources to put my rules for technical teams into practice.
If you want to learn how to hire great technical talent, read Smart and Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky. It’s an engineer’s perspective on hiring great engineers, and it’ll help you get things right the first time so you don’t have to worry about the issues I discussed in the article.
The title of CTO is not a necessity. Really, titles aren’t what you should be worrying about. This article is a good perspective on why titles aren’t as important as we make them out to be. It will help you as you try and build a culture where work matters more than title.
If you are a CEO thinking about hiring your first people manager and wondering what title to give them, don’t. Avoid the heartache, pain and future organizational challenges that come from — and with — titles.
Product momentum requires a short feedback cycle. You’ve got to build a culture of moving quickly and iterating as rapidly as possible. This article by Dave Girouard will give you the steps to creating a speed-oriented culture.
Too many people believe that speed is the enemy of quality. To an extent they’re right — you can’t force innovation and sometimes genius needs time and freedom to bloom. But in my experience, that’s the rare case. There’s not always a stark tradeoff between something done fast and done well. Don’t let you or your organization use that as a false shield or excuse to lose momentum. The moment you do, you lose your competitive advantage.
Your technical team should be just as customer-obsessed as you. When building the product, your developer should be thinking about delivering customer value above all else. Josh Elman gives a great perspective on customer focus from a developer’s perspective here.
If I’ve learned anything about the key to building products that last, it’s this:
Deeply understanding the individual use cases of everyone who touches the product, and what “success” means for them.
If you’re nontechnical, revisit my tips for building software products as a non-technical founder.
Join the Let’s Build Community to get personalized insights into handling your technical team. Myself, my team, and the other members of the community have lots of experience to share.